#154 Rabid Raccoon?

I was driving home from the City of Alachua (Florida) when I saw two cars parked along C.R. 239 ahead of me. They had their emergency flashers on, and there was a gray fox standing on the edge of the road by the cars. I drove up and put my flashers on too. I stayed with the animal thirty minutes waving traffic around him and watching his behavior. He didn't seem fazed by people, stood motionless for many minutes, would lie down on the road, then sit up and eventually arch his head way back and open his mouth, and then walk about twenty feet where he proceeded to repeat the same. The remaining Hare Krishna and I both called the police and soon after my call, an officer appeared. He walked up to the fox with impunity. By then I had noticed that two thin streams of blood had either come out of the fox's mouth or nose, so I warned the officer. The officer then found a long stick and pushed the fox off the road. The poor animal walked into the high grass and was gone. The first Hare Krishna said that she had just seen another fox act like this fox a few days before. "He was lying on the side of the road, and suddenly got up and took off," she said. I suspect rabies since the behavior was so odd.
This makes my fourth 911 call in about the same number of months. I had blogged about the first two, and the third came when I saw a blonde girl about ten years old, running along 441 in High Springs. Each time a car passed, she would look at it. I thought it wouldn't be long before some pervert came along and pulled over to offer her a ride, so I called 911, asking them to send over a cop to ask her what was wrong.
For about a month, I have had two arrows lost out on the range. Last week, I happened to look at a line an armadillo had plowed into the leaves as he searched for bugs. I followed the line with my eyes and saw an arrow that he had pushed up from beneath the leaves. Armadillos will also eat eggs and young animals, and I am sure they are one reason Florida no longer has the abundant quail and rabbit populations it used to enjoy.
For years, I have seen a turkey hen nest just off our lane, on our property. I saw her the second time this spring. Even though I love cats, I have to decide it I should help the hen turkey raise her brood again this year or help the cats by feeding them on our property. They are mutually exclusive choices. I'm deciding right now that I will make a determined effort to consistently drive off the cats when I pick them up at night with a headlamp and put corn on the lane for the turkey hen. I will put food for the cats off-property. Tasha and I helped a mother feral cat raise her three kittens by putting out food for them over the span of about a year, but they can find the food that I will put out off-property for them. We have a new set of neighbors for the turkey hen to contend with this year. They drive on the lane a lot, and more importantly, they have a big red dog who now only runs the lane but runs in the cattle pasture next door. The dog is a big threat to a the hen and her brood. I may start chasing him away when he comes on the part of the lane that we own. By law, he's supposed to be leashed. He goes by the Starling's trailer all the time, and they are showing their hypocrisy by not taking his picture and reporting him like they did our dogs. It shows they did it with our dogs only to be hateful toward us. Remember how Shadow, the black lab, jumped out of Tasha's truck on the lane, and before Tasha could get him back into the truck, Sheri Starling got a picture of him "being loose" and called Alachua County Animal Control? Also, remember how the robotic brown-shirt fined us $100 for the dog momentarily jumping out of the truck on a private lane? Isn't big government grand?
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Peter "Two-Guns" Nickerson, MS, MSW at peternickerson12@yahoo.com